


Grounding

by poisonling



Category: Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: Emotions galore, Gen, feel free to scroll past and not read, im only posting it for my own sake, this is more personal than anything, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 16:06:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7470189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisonling/pseuds/poisonling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rabbit reflects on her mechanical nature.</p>
<p>Vent fic. Unfinished, and will probably stay that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grounding

**Author's Note:**

> As said in the summary, this is unfinished. No need to read, honestly. In my personal life, a loved one has suffered a massive stroke and has left me with a lot of unresolved emotions. I needed to write it out, and, for the same reason, I need to post it. I need to get it out there. I used Rabbit as a poppet for my own feelings, so this may be OOC. I can hardly care at this point; my writing is an expression of myself.
> 
> Anyway, this is also an explanation for why Red & Copper hasn't been updated in a while. Life is life. Forgive me.

Hetero-chromatic beams of emerald and sapphire fell dim as Rabbit closed her heavy metal eyelids; a whir of cogs turning as she did so resounded behind her face plate. Mechanical hums were her life now - the silence would grow too heavy otherwise. She could feel every gear turning and grinding in her head, and that's what kept her grounded as generations flew by.

As humanoid as the Walter robotics appeared, they were far from it. Metal and wires instead of flesh and bone, gnashing machinery replacing corpulent organs. Feelings weren't in their programming; at least, that's what the Walter lineage had always assumed. Immortal metal men designed for war had no need for emotions, no capacity for heartache. CPUs and hardware could not reproduce authentic human emotion.

Rabbit felt so far from human sometimes. As the Walter heritage decayed and was reborn around them, the automatons stayed the same. Face plates and upgrades came and went, but the bots remained stagnant. With proper upkeep traversing five generations of Walters, they watched so many be borne into the family, then take their last breath in hardly a blink of a metal eyelid. Decay for them was marked only by rust or oxidation. The robots would not age, and they would not die.

Annie Walter lie very still in her bed. Settled around her were her husband and son, the Fifth and the Sixth, and the 119 year old robots who had lived in the Manor long before Annie had even been born. The room was somber and silent, save for the disjointed breathing from the three Walters and the whirring coming from the automatons. The Spine stood straight and tall behind the Fifth, who was seated in a plump chair and angled towards his wife's bed, and adjacent to the Sixth, who looked ancient and brooding in the light of the lamp as he stared down at his mother. Rabbit and Hatchworth both stood at the foot of the bed, peering at the sick woman with knowing bleakness in their expressions.

They'd seen it all too many times. Another generation was passing.

Time didn't affect robots in the way it affected the humans around them. While the blink of an eye was fleeting, so too were long, blissful moments. Years could feel like seconds, but moments could feel unending at times. Never long enough, though.

Rabbit felt so far from human sometimes, but other times she knew the emotions her human family would talk about. She felt quite strongly, despite it not being written in her coding. She knew heartache and the feeling of loss. She grieved. As Annie departed from her body, Rabbit would swear oil nearly leaked out of her face plate at the eyes. 

Tears were beyond her ability, but sometimes she wished she could manufacture them. Crying could help let some of the pent-up emotion out. Instead, bottled within her mechanical heart, were the unforgotten memories saved from over a century. Faces of loved ones who grew up and were gone in a heartbeat haunted her CPU. With the ability to reexamine and analyze 119 years worth of moments, Rabbit knew better than most that what is gone will stay gone. Living within those memories was dangerous; it would be too easy to drown herself in the world of the past.

Instead, Rabbit focused on grinding gears and buzzing cogs. It was all she could count on in the world sometimes.


End file.
